anyone interested in buying a laptop for knoppix?

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I don't know if this would interest anyone...but I have an HP Athlon XP based laptop with 512MB of RAM, a DVD reader with CD burner and an 802.11g wifi card. I've had this laptop (its an HP ze4610us) for almost a year and a half and it has stopped recognizing my hard drive. :( I've put the hard drive in a different laptop of the same model and it works just fine. Putting my friend's HD in my laptop resulted in the same problems as with my HD...no boot...not finding of HD.

:(

But it boots to knoppix from CD just fine (doesn't find the wifi card from what I can tell...not expert linux user and haven't messed around with knoppix before).

We don't have much use for a laptop that can't boot to windows (wife is a windows only user), so we're going to buy a new laptop and I was wondering if someone here might be interested in buying this laptop (without the hard drive and as far as I know without the possibility of adding a hard drive...at least not without going to USB...and it only has USB 1.1 built in). If I don't sell it I'll most likely just rip out all the components and try to ebay them seperately.

anyone interested?

[OErjan]

nothing is impossible. actually it would be fairly easy to use an adapter and use the DVD/CDrw's channel to house the HDD, both are ATA devises so...
that solution would force you to live without the DVD/CDrw. but you would get a working HDD on the laptop.

just a thought, have you checked that the "ribbon" is fully inserted into the socket on the other end?
I am talking about the ribbon sometimes atached to the hdd conector, that may get broken or dislodged, it is very fragile and the socket just "clamps" it in place.
hmm, here you have a link showing the type of cable and how tu detach/atach it.
http://www.massena.com/darrin/pilot/luiz/item9.htm
it is not 100% same but it was what i could find, principle is same.

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I haven't actually taken the laptop apart yet to play with it. I suppose I probably should at least try some unseating and reseating of cables and such. I wonder if it would be possible to connect the HD to the CD-ROM's port...hmmm....

Thanks for the ideas...I may have to tear this thing apart tonight.

[OErjan]

i KNOW it is possible, i have done it to my old compaq 5150.
it has only support for a 6Ghdd (it canot "see" larger) i had a second hdd on it for a while (the old 2Gb to be precise),
and yes on the CDrom port.
I got the contact soldered wires (from an old IDE cable) from each pin on that to the pins on the hdd, i then glued the whole thing to a thin piece of plexi (to get the contact seated and hdd inside the computer).
it worked well for several weeks until the old already failing drive died on me:-(.